The Gambler

My Facebook advertising experiment needed to generate $2,500 to be an unqualified success; $1,500 would have justified continuing and refining the ads. I was sure that it would at least recoup its $350 up-front cost – that’s only 10 sales, after all. Actual sales that I can pin to FB ads: $0. This year’s FB referrals fell by 34% over the same period LY, from 56 to 37. My “weekly total people reached” moving average rose from 47 to 42,158. The only result I’m seeing from that 10,000-fold increase is a spike in marketing pitches. I did pick up seven new “Likes,” which might be worth slightly more than zero. Very slightly.

The ad agency had strongly recommended linking the ads to my FB page rather than to my store, as most FB users don’t like to leave FB. You’re apparently supposed to send them to a landing page with a “click for special offer” gimmick that gives people a discount code and refers them to your website. That might have worked a little better…but spending extra to generate discounted sales is a losing strategy.

So that unambiguous failure makes the cancellation decision easy. I spent $700 on three tests over two years to prove to myself that FB advertising is 100% worthless for selling products.

OK, I gambled and lost. What now? It just so happens that I’m weighing another gamble. That will be next week’s post.

And Then, Nothing Happened

The week of Valentines Day is always among the worst of the year, and this year didn’t disappoint. February numbers come out next week.

The company that I hired to advertise on Facebook sent me their initial proposal. Their $100 “creative services” were…uncreative, to put it charitably. Rewriting their ads set the launch and billing dates back by another week or so, assuming that I accept their revisions. Oh, and I did finally turn down the international freight consolidator that I wrote about last week. So I guess something happened after all.

According to my tax returns, my official 2011 profit was $2,850 – almost identical to the $2,900 that I estimated in December. Cash flow turned red again after paying my CPA for tax preparation, the Secretary of the Commonwealth to accept my annual report, and the Mass. DOR to keep Kraken Enterprises alive. My biggest annual obligations are now met and I’ll be back in the black if business rebounds to normal next week.

This would be a really good time for my Facebook advertising gambit to pay off. 

I Am the Decider

I suck at making decisions. When I’m facing a choice or a problem, thoughts swirl around my brain until they come to rest in well-worn slots and I wind up right back where I started – nothing solved, no decision made. If I shake my brain like a snow globe the same thoughts take the same paths to the same slots. Sometimes I can work that out right here in my blog. But my innate aversion to risk usually paralyzes me. This is not a good trait for an entrepreneur to have.

 

Example One: A caller quizzed me about international sales – a sour topic, as I generally don’t like them. They’re a trivial fraction of my business with disproportionate hassles. Would I like to increase them while reducing the headache? His employer would take over my international shipping at no cost to me. All I had to do was implement a few lines of code, and foreign customers would be directed to his company. I would merely ship domestically to their warehouse and they would do the rest. I asked him to send me some materials to review.

After a few days he called back. I hadn’t received his email (he had the address wrong). He resent it. I started researching it, got bored, and set it aside in the hope that it might just go away. It didn’t. He called again; I put him off again. Although his company has plugin modules for several PHP shopping carts, they don’t have one for Sunshop; I’d have to do a custom implementation. He assured me that the process was simple and that their support people would hold my hand. I’m skeptical. Nothing technical ever goes smoothly and I’d very likely end up paying my developer to get me out of trouble. It would complicate future version upgrades. Customers using a ship-to address in a different country than their credit card issuer and their IP address would definitely set off my credit card fraud filter. Google didn’t have any feedback from other merchants, but I did find some customers with various complaints about their service and prices. It seems like something with low risk and a small potential payoff, but a high initial hassle factor.

My gut says that it’s more hassle than it’s worth, and that the potential benefits wouldn’t outweigh the probable drawbacks. A Cayman Islands resort placed last week’s big Create-a-Bird kite order. Would I have still made that sale if we’d had to go through this consolidator?

But caution and inertia might be behind all these rationalizations. Over the years I’ve toyed with ending international sales entirely. Wouldn’t it be better if I could farm them out instead, and possibly even increase them in the process?

See those thoughts landing in well-worn grooves? I think the salesman might have finally given up and gone away while I decided not to decide.

Example Two: A personable young lady rang me up last week to pitch her advertising agency. Ordinarily I get people like her off the phone as soon as I can politely do so…and I’ve been known to skip the politeness part when I’m in a bad mood, which is most of the time. But she happened to reach me while I was despairing over this year’s sales funk, and she persuaded me that Facebook advertising might just break down my limits. I spent several hundred dollars last year trying to tap into Facebook’s bajillion users for Valentines Day and again for Mothers Day. I wrote off Facebook advertising as overpriced and ineffective when those experiments failed. 

But what if I just wasn’t doing it right? What if somebody a lot savvier than me could turn a comparable investment into a big sales increase? This company charges about what I wasted on LY’s experiments. They will succeed or they will not – the results are easily measurable. At worst, I’d waste a few hundred more bucks that I can’t afford and ruin my chances of reining in advertising costs this year. But at least nobody dies. At best, adding a major new advertising campaign might pump my sales up enough to get some momentum going again. I could even pause my Google campaigns for a couple of weeks to cover the cost. Next week was one of the slowest of last year, so I wouldn't even forfeit very much business.

What to do? What to do? As usual, my brain tormented me for days. When my wife joined me on my morning walk one day, she let me blabber on about both of these issues at great length. She asked some good questions as the miles slipped by. I got them answered, and I made a decision: I signed up for Facebook advertising. They have my Amex number. The meter starts running when the campaign goes live next week.

The Purge

Constant Contact’s price doubles when you reach 500 email addresses. My newsletter subscriber list recently passed 400 and was growing by 10-15 per month, while my open rate had dipped to around 20%. It was time to purge.

Email addresses are fragile. People change ISPs, or they lose their jobs, or they sign up for Yahoo and Gmail addresses that they never use. Permanence is rare. When we switched over to BELD.net this year Anne and I opted to pay Earthlink $3 per month to preserve the addresses we’ve had since 1987. But even those will die by the end of this year; we aren’t going to pay that $3 forever.

Constant Contact’s process for cleaning up one’s list is hidden – after all, bloated email lists are lucrative for them. I actually had to email their support department to find the online instructions. The process is pretty convoluted and the results don’t quite match the instructions. Without numbing you with too much detail: You duplicate your main mailing list, then remove everyone who has opened an email in the past 90 days (the past two issues, for me). The remaining “unconfirmed” addresses -- 286 in my case – get an opt-in newsletter. If they click the link therein, they go back on the list; if they don’t, they’re out. Forty-one of those 286 people opened the email and 22 of them clicked the link. In other words, 41 of the 286 addresses that I culled turned out to be valid and 22 were interested subscribers.

In the end I got rid of 245 garbage addresses. I won’t have to worry about hitting that 500-address price increase again for years now.

With the remaining 158 names known to be good, my newsletter open rate ought to approach 100%, right? You’d think so. But only 60 people looked at the Fathers Day free shipping coupon that I sent out this week. Two emails (both sent to friends…Joy, what happened to your hotmail address?) bounced as non-existent. Fathers Day is a poor benchmark because my average customer is too old to care, and my newsletter’s subject line (“3 Days Only: Free Shipping for Fathers Day”) wasn’t cute or clever. But a 38% open rate is disappointing after such a thorough cleanup. The issue did bring in one nice big sale, though, so there’s that.

Incidentally, a Constant Contact telephone support guy told me that what I did was very advanced stuff for their user base. Fewer than 1% of their customers ever try to purge their mailing lists. It’s no wonder I couldn’t find the instructions in their FAQ; the question isn’t asked frequently.
Anyway: If you didn’t get a newsletter this week, please use the Newsletter Signup box on the upper right side of this page to re-join my list.

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I just figured out how to add a Facebook “Like” button to the bottom of my website. I’ve been stuck at 120-123 fans for months now. Maybe this will get that growing again. Just this week I had my first customer answer “How did you find us?” with “Saw your Facebook page.”

I also figured out how to work around Blogger's broken image upload function by simply editing the HTML code. I posted a question on their Help blog last week and never got an answer. So I should be able to amuse you with pictures again.

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Mochahost finally closed my old account on Sunday, six days after I put in the order. No mention of a refund. But that’s OK: the $40 that they’re keeping will buy them a lot of bad publicity. I won’t hesitate to tell the world (via the Googlebot) that Mocha was the worst company I’ve encountered in almost six years in business.

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Overall Fathers Day sales were poor. The week ending 6/11 was pretty good at 122% of LY. But this week, which should have brought the big rush, is running a paltry 69% of LY. Last year’s numbers were inflated by one big sale of Mini Briefcases – not Fathers Day business at all. With a day and a half left, this week could still deliver the $500 that it’s short. But it ain’t likely.

I'll be back in two weeks with June's numbers, assuming nothing interesting happens before then.

Here We Go Again

Every fall, I tremble before my November and December sales targets. I don’t care for Christmas personally, but professionally it’s everything. Right now we’re still in that relaxed phase when holiday sales are building steadily, but shoppers’ sense of urgency is still two weeks away and their desperation is farther out still.
Where on earth do people get all the money?

My paycheck today – the first of four healthy ones that I earn each year – works out to $7.75/hour based on two 35-hour weeks – higher than the federal minimum wage and only slightly below that of Massachusetts. Not bad! I’m going to raise payroll from 20% to 20.25% of net sales if I achieve my 15% planned sales increase in this difficult year. Of course, every dollar that goes into payroll is a dollar that doesn’t go into my profit payout at the end of the year. Without sales growth it’s a zero-sum game.

Week One just barely beat LY, but a large customer return that I authorized yesterday will wipe out that small gain (and then some). This week petered out after a very strong start; it’s still achievable, but it’s another nail-biter.

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Four customers have selected “I clicked an ad on Facebook” since I added that choice to my optional “How did you find us?” dropdown list. Absent tracking code from FB, that’s my only ironclad evidence that FB advertising works. It’s certainly driving traffic; the “referring sites” category has gone from 15 visitors a day to 100, and Facebook is the single biggest referrer. What I can’t measure directly is sales conversions. I did get this message from somebody who saw my FB Switchables ad:

This is an extremely good idea. I am sharing this on Facebook. This is genius :-) The ad caught my eye. This is an EXCELLENT CHRISTMAS IDEA as well, to new home owners, people with new babies (or even old babies :-) (…) I shared your weblink with my FB friends (about 300) and will do so again because the idea is awesome, and your prices are very, very good for the quality and detail.

That alone is worth FB’s sky-high ad rates.

My biggest current worry is spending obscene amounts on advertising while just barely eking out my sales numbers. Keyword bids have gone insane – some genius is bidding $2.50 per click – not per conversion, per click -- on Buckyballs. Even an unrealistically high 5% conversion rate would mean paying $50 per sale of a $30 product. Nobody can compete with that…which is how it works. Astronomical bids ensure you top placement, but your actual charge is what it costs to beat the next-highest bidder. In other words, if the second-place bidder is “only” offering 75 cents a click, then our 900-pound gorilla’s $2.50 bid really costs him “only” 76 cents. If the number-two bidder calls his bluff and goes to $5.00 then suddenly the original gorilla is actually paying $2.50 for second place, while the usurper gets the top for $2.51. It’s a high-priced game of chicken that I can’t begin to play. Keyword inflation is happening across the board. Every time I go into my accounts to pare back my bids, I end up raising them instead just to maintain my positions.

Buckyballs are this year’s biggest disappointment, btw. I was sure that they were this year’s Big Thing before I found out that I can’t afford to advertise them. They’re getting some clicks, but nobody’s buying.

Actually, scratch what I said above; my biggest current worry is raking the yard. Every year I vow that I will hire someone to do it for me next fall; every year, I can’t afford that. So I’ll lose 2-3 hours each afternoon for most of next week (getting dark at 5 pm doesn't help). We have a tiny lot, but a lot of huge old trees. And now I need to eat lunch, box and ship orders, and start raking. What a smegging waste of time.

I Fought the Web (And the Web Won)

Technology seldom beats me outright. Oh sure: constant change, complexity, and expense bedevil me as much as the next guy. I don’t understand smart phones at all, for example, or why we need to pay $110 a month for dumb cell
phones on top of $120 for normal phone/cable TV/internet. I know only the rudiments of using the DVR. I don’t own a MP3 player and I rarely take my cell phone out of my office. I haven’t been able to run a new game on my 7.5-year-old gaming PC for at least three years now. I have never seen a Blu-ray disk. I am, in short, permanently stuck circa 2005.

And yet, the years that I worked in software development equipped me with the basic skills to muddle through this whole internet thing. When I can’t solve a problem myself, I know where to seek help. Persistence and money usually bend technology to my will. Usually. Some problems can’t be solved.

The PayPal Checkout Loop goes back to at least 2007, but that’s a Sunshop bug – there’s nothing I can do about it. Turnkey can’t fix it because I can’t reproduce it, and since nobody but me has ever reported it it is likely to endure forever.

The Admin timeout bug has plagued me ever since I moved to MochaHost. It’s caused by an operating system setting on my shared server that they refuse to change – unless I upgrade to a dedicated server or change hosting companies, I must continue logging in every 24 minutes for the rest of eternity, like Desmond pushing his button. At least the island doesn’t move when I blow it off, Brother.


Now we can add USPS shipping times to that short list. Here’s the background that I wrote back in February:

In January the USPS raised rates on Priority Mail and Express Mail; First Class and Parcel Post rates stayed the same. Customers usually choose the least-expensive Parcel Post option, and I've always upgraded those orders to either UPS Ground or Priority Mail. The upgraded price is still at or below my actual cost, the customer gets better service than they paid for, and everybody’s happy.

Or was until now. Priority Mail rates went up and Parcel Post did not. That means that my shipping costs rose while the fees I collect – which come from rate table lookups -- didn’t. The advent of zoned pricing sometimes makes West Coast upgrades a losing proposition. Shrinking the small spread between fees collected and costs paid out is harming my bottom line.

To rectify that, I could:
1. Raise my handling fee. But that penalizes my First Class, UPS, and east coast customers.
2. Increase product weights. But that punishes my most desirable customers – those who buy multiple products at once.
3. Eliminate Parcel Post. But taking away the lowest-priced option would make my shipping charges visibly higher and harm a competitive advantage.
4. Leave everything unchanged and accept the smaller spread. But that makes it more difficult to reach my sales plan (which I calculate based on net sales after shipping costs) and ultimately comes out of my pocket.
5. Actually ship via Parcel Post more often. But shipments that now take 2-3 days would take 7-10 days. Customers won’t like that.

An attentive reader suggested a sixth solution: Show customers the transit times. If they see “Priority Mail: 2-3 Days” and “Parcel Post: 4-10 Days”, most will pay the incremental cost for Priority, my rate spread will be covered, and profitability will improve. Brilliant! I just need to edit the shipping method dropdown list that appears in the shipping estimator and at checkout. That’s, like, five minutes’ work at the most, right?

Yeah, about that. USPS domestic, USPS international, and UPS each have a shipping module consisting of a single small file. When I edit them in Textpad my UPS text shows up immediately. USPS text never does. So is it stored somewhere else? The independent developers in Turnkey’s Modifications forum keep referring me back to the same USPS.php file that’s not working. Turnkey itself remains silent; they’re not obliged to support user mods. In one last shot at ending the stalemate, I prevailed upon my developer to investigate. His verdict:

Usps.php has an install method that clearly writes this stuff to the database when the module is "installed" and it looks like checkout is calling a function in global.php called "get_shipping" which really looks like it's reading from the database to generate dropdown options... but I don't know how any of this stuff ties together... so I could be way off base.

I do see something that looks like it might be setting up a http call and parsing a response in usps.php as well... so maybe it's a web call. *shrug*

I'm fairly confident it's not reading values from USPS.php (that would be... extremely idiotic)

Turnkey hasn't made this very straightforward... so it’s not trivial to figure out how that's being generated.

If you want me to figure this out I will, but you're going to have to give me a few weeks to find time to do some hardcore reverse engineering and put up with me hacking up (and very likely breaking) your shipping functionality for a bit while I troubleshoot.

Higher shipping charge receipts would eventually recoup the cost of hiring Brad to reverse-engineer this function – assuming that he can “fix” it at all; if the text is being passed from the USPS server along with the rates, I’m just screwed. And “eventually” is a long time; I can’t afford any more unplanned expenses in a year that’s already been hammered by them.

So I am back to Square One. Right now I’m still absorbing the increased costs. If sales were running anywhere near plan I might remove the cheap Parcel Post option; very few other shops offer it. But sales have still not crawled out of the crapper that I plumbed last week; I can’t risk doing anything that might flush them deeper.

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Speaking of last week…Forget everything I said about Facebook advertising. Turns out that I can advertise products directly, so I started with an ad for my old warhorse, Panther Vision caps. After a week my exhorbitant 75-cent bid bought 5,555 impressions without one single click. Crap. On Monday I added Switchables and Buckyballs to my campaign. On Tuesday I reordered golf balls and started advertising them. As of this morning Switchables has racked up 54 clicks, golf balls have 45, Buckyballs have only six, and Panther caps remain stuck at 0. FB’s tracking code is in beta, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that the $27.75 I spent this week brought in a single sale. Click-through rates are abysmal on FB, and the cost to buy impressions is very high. As nice as it is to see overall traffic spike past 300 daily visits (!), I can’t afford this for very long.

FB’s infamous intrusion on its members’ privacy is its main appeal to advertisers: I can target my ads very narrowly based on the interests that users willingly reveal. I’ve decided to cough up $50 of my own to prolong this experiment for another week; if I can figure out how to use this precise targeting to reduce my cost, it's worth flogging through Christmas.

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Speaking of the crapper…Christmas is finally starting to crawl out of it. For the rest of this year I’m throwing plan out the window; I just need to match LY. At the moment sales are running 22% behind last year with a day and a half (21% of the week) left to go. It’s going to be tight, but I might just barely make my nut for this important first week of November. It’s a fairly big nut.

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Now that the voting is over I can get back to being my usual level-headed, moderate self. After one parting shot at politics, that is.

After spending $250 million on midterm campaigns, corporate America has got the Congress it paid for. I’ve cut next year’s planned sales increase by 50% to reflect the two additional years of economic stagnation that voters just ratified. There will be no second stimulus package. There will be no more unemployment benefit extensions. The economy has been cut loose.

Americans did not vote the Republicans in so much as they voted the Democrats out. Republicans owe their gains to two factions (apart from the Tea Party’s billionaire backers), and the fate of their party depends on which one they reward. Their main support in 2010 came from the same independent, moderate voters who flocked to Obama in 2008. These swing voters expect them to work with the Democrats on solving this country’s real problems, and they will desert in 2012 if they don’t see tangible progress. Republicans would be wise to deliver it. The other faction -- Tea Party extremists – promised conflict and confrontation. Their uncompromising ideological purity, if indulged, will ensure that nothing gets done. Republicans certainly owe them some grand symbolic gestures, like introducing a doomed health care repeal bill, but they would be unwise to give them anything substantial. Tea Partiers have no alternative to voting Republican so the party need not kowtow to them.

This struggle for control over the Republican Party is fascinating fallout from their recent victory. I’d actually feel sorry for Republicans if the poor and middle class weren’t going to be the main casualties of this power struggle.

My home state of Massachusetts successfully fought off the Republican wave entirely. They did not win a single position of consequence here. Our Commonwealth remains solidly blue and unashamedly liberal after roundly rejecting budget cutters and tax cutters. So I’m somewhat insulated from whatever shenanigans they pull in Congress – except inasmuch as the harm that they do to the national economy drags Massachusetts down with everyone else. Nobody’s going to take away our universal health care or gut social programs or repeal our rights here, so I can be sanguine about developments that are alarming progressives elsewhere.

From Curio City’s point of view, two more years of tepid economic growth are the most chilling result of last Tuesday’s election. This business was predicated on rapid growth to bootstrap from zero to a living wage. The Great Recession already trimmed my sails; Republican-induced stagnation could ultimately sink the ship. It just depends on how much longer I’m willing to keep bailing.

I Like Spikes

I’ve had about 70 Facebook followers (formerly “fans”, now “likers” I guess) for half a year now. That number only fluctuates by a couple of people one way or the other. Yesterday it spiked to 82 people. Momentum! With your help I might reach my goal of 100 fans by the end of this year.

Who are you?

• 60% of you are female and 39% are male. The other 1% are either confused or a rounding error.

• Women aged 45-54 are the single biggest demographic at 21%. Women aged 55+ are the next biggest at 14%. Men aged 35-44 are third with 12%. About 14% of you are under age 25.

• Each one of you contributes 1.28% to the total.

• 83% of you are in the US. Malaysia, Peru, Chile, The Philippines, Venezuela, Panama (hi Rob!), the UK, Cyprus, and Mexico are also represented. I’ve shipped to all of those countries, although Malaysia is now blacklisted as a high-risk country.

How can I get 18 more followers and reach 100 in the next few months? I seldom post apart from my weekly blogcast, so that must be what draws new fans and repels existing ones. For a time I tried posting new product arrivals and stock status updates on FB, but I think that got annoying quickly – I have a low tolerance for advertising myself and am leery of wearing out my welcome. Announcing real news, such as vacation dates or discount offers or this weekend’s Massachusetts sales tax holiday, seems to be the best use of FB.

Facebook would love to sell me advertising. The cost is modest and the effort is slight. But what exactly would I advertise – my page? My store? A product? Who would see these ads and where would they appear? I’ve never seen an ad on FB myself. Of course, AdBlock for Firefox keeps me from seeing most ads anywhere, and apart from trying to figure out the marketing angle I don’t get very involved in FB. I have no idea whether or not there’s any value in advertising here.

Is it even worth reaching for 100?

Referring sites are one of my favorite free traffic sources. Nearly 12% of my visitors arrive via links from other sites. Facebook sends Curio City 25-30 visitors a week and is my #3 referral source. Since 3% of visitors buy something, FB delivers 3-4 sales per month (possibly more, since those visits are presumably motivated by posts that I make). That’s a typical day’s business during the slow months – not shabby at all.

Gaining 18 more FB followers would generate 0.6 more sales per month. OK, that’s not exactly the road to riches. But followers beget more followers – there’s a snowball effect that will eventually sustain itself. I think that threshold is around 100.

So if it’s not too much to ask…get out there and get begetting! Go to our page in your Favorites list and click “Suggest to Friends” beneath our logo. If you didn’t arrive at this blog post via FB, use the “Like” button near the top of the right-hand column to join.

Oh, and as long as I’m begging…don’t forget to click those ads between posts.

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Last week I mentioned that I’d spent $11 to intercept a fraudulent UPS shipment. It actually cost $11 for the interception…plus $35.05 for return freight…plus a $2.80 fuel surcharge. I suspected that they might bone me for return postage, and that they’d charge a premium for air shipment. The fuel surcharge is just plain insulting, though.

That brings the total cost of this criminal to $130, almost all of which went to UPS because I shipped too promptly. I’d have lost less money if I’d just let the thief have the merchandise, but the satisfaction of denying him anything tangible for all the trouble he caused is worth the cost.

What About Facebook?

This week just brings a few random thoughts.

I got these brief replies when I asked my Facebook fans (now 56 strong, woohoo!) how I could make my FB page useful and interesting:

• “New products”
• “there's a simplaris blogcast app that you can use to broadcast your blogs each week.”
• “Items that have gone on sale”
• “Sale items and seasonal merchandise”

I integrated the simplaris app today, but haven’t tested it yet. Hopefully this post will just magically appear on my store's FB page. Turnkey says they’re developing a FB plugin for Sunshop that would let me put my whole store catalog on my FB page. I need to see if Constant Contact can integrate my newsletters as well. I expect that they can, for a price.

I’m slowly forming an idea of FB as a portal to the Kraken Empire. I’ll post a biography and a company history and supplement that with a few photos. I’ll use those plugins to port content from my store and my blog to my FB page. And I’ll try to direct FB visitors to the blog and store. Actual news will be confined to wall posts, as I’m doing now.

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Charter.net recently joined Comcast in blocking email from Constant Contact. I only lost four newsletter subscribers this time. I hate seeing interested customers get blocked by overzealous ISPs…oh well, I’m sure Constant Contact serves up a lot of real spam. Maybe the blocked customers will join Facebook.

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I finally wrote off $250 worth of greeting cards and closed the department. I wanted to get this insult to my bottom line out of the way early. My wife was happy to inherit them.

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Speaking of the bottom line, sales were decent vs. LY but well short of plan. I realized that my 2010 accounting January has one less week than 2009’s January, so plan is kind of hard to gauge this month.

Might as well pay taxes. I spent two hours filing four returns for $1,897.42. I know that payroll and sales taxes aren’t Kraken’s money in the first place, but it sure did take a whack out of my checking account. And I’m not done: the state isn’t ready yet to accept my $300 in unemployment taxes and $456 in corporate excise. There’s also something called a Pass-Through Entity Withholding Tax. I think this closes a loophole for big corporations. I don’t owe it, but I still have to file a form.

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Thank me for greatly condensing this next bit; my first draft reported each line item to three decimal places. Instead you get this summary: Four budget items – payment processing, printing, write-offs/shrink, and shipping supplies – cumulatively came in about 1% under plan last year. Another item – customer discounts – was half a point over. If 2010 makes plan then the half percent in play amounts to $344. I put $250 of that into my web support budget and $65 toward computer hardware/software. The remainder can go to profit. By such baby steps does a business crawl ahead.